Huh. I didn’t know that calling them road turtles was just a Washington and Oregon thing.
Those look like what I’d call Cat’s Eyes only not as good. I wish they had more of them here.
THANK YOU for saying this.
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There are reflective ones for newer installations, one reflector and 3 normal. Also blue reflective ones so firemen can spot hydrants in the dark which unless you know that always look out of place in the middle of the road on a side street.
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The blue ones are also offset from the centerline of the street toward the side where the hydrant is located. Simple, elegant solutions to geo-positional navigation problems ftw.
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Yes, lane splitting makes riding safer. It also makes tightly wound car drivers mental and inclined to violence, as this thread illustrates. Live and let live, cagers.
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Bless you sir.
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Lane-splitting has recently been legalised in my home state.
Viz. most motorists are fucking idiots.
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Read the book “Traffic” to open your eyes about “late mergers”. Turns out using all available lanes and merging late is the most efficient way to disperse traffic volume. It depends on the absence of assholes at the merge who somehow think that allowing a traffic merge is somehow going to keep them from getting there faster. In fact, it speeds everyone’s progress.
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I rode a pretty good-sized bike for many years in CA. We didn’t call it “lane-splitting,” back then it was called “lane-sharing,” and it was exactly the same relationship that exists between motorists (cagers) and bicyclists today.
I lane-shared often during my commute up and down the Peninsula. The only time I came close to injury was on the Bay Bridge maybe 25 years ago when a jackass in a truck opened his driver-side door just as I was coming up to him in stopped traffic. Fortunately I was only going about 8mph, and even more fortunately, motorcycles can stop a lot more quickly than most car drivers can comprehend. I flipped up my visor and shouted something nasty to him, and he ducked inside his truck, probably to find a baseball bat or a gun, but I shoved his car door shut and rode on by.
Really?
DoD #0000023
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Nobody ever wants to let anyone in, if their cars had ramparts and battlements, they’d be pouring boiling oil down the murderholes in gridlock.
So zipper merging is a fool’s errand. What you get instead is basically a pileup of busses and cars at the end of the lane who just have to sit and wait until traffic isn’t in gridlock anymore. So pretty much zipper merging is asking to sit stationary for 20 minutes while people creep by at 5mph.
I consider getting to my job ontime to be important. So I always merge into the center-most lane on the five lane freeway about two miles before both the leftmost and rightmost lanes end. And I get to keep going. The people trying to zipper merge don’t get to keep going, because literally nobody’s going to let them in.
It’s awful. But the freeway is lord of the flies, and I’m not going to end up as piggy. I let people into my lane all the time. But you won’t catch me relying on the incredibly unlikely kindness of a stranger when I already know that the lane’s going to end. Nobody’s ever been nice to me when I’m at the end of the lane before, so it’s stupid to expect them to be nice to me in the future unless there’s some huge change.
He checked his mirror. I would imagine that a motorcycle splitting lanes at a much higher rate of speed than the rest of traffic is pretty hard to pick up on a mirror. Seeing motorcycles is hard enough as it is.
It’s fascinating how our human psyches seem to absorb the dynamical characteristics of the machines we cybernetically pilot.
As a sometimes daily motorist in heavy urban city traffic, and regular “vehicular” cyclist who feels generally very safe lane-sharing in busy city street traffic. This article doesn’t surprise me, I’d suggest the safety is due to the following:
Bikes can accelerate, decelerate and negotiate obstacles quicker than cars, (lower mass and speed). Factoring equal delays with traffic lights, and less with stop signs on city streets, the net velocity of a bike and car is pretty much equal. Situational awareness due to acoustic factors, ease of visibility and survival instinct is enhanced far beyond what one experiences behind the steering wheel.
I think that motorists who are disturbed by other kinds of vehicles on the streets are reacting to a conflict between the differential between autos responsive capabilities and those of smaller vehicles. The biggest dangers in lane-sharing are large speed differences and vehicles changing lanes without signalling.
Guy zipping past me hit my mirror with his. Broke my mirror and dented my fender, but totaled his bike and put him in the hospital. I’ve seen it as a bit suicidal ever since.
Lane splitting has been conditionally legal in Australia in NSW for a year, and in QLD for about 4 months. So far, there have been no notable increases of motorcycle/vehicle collisions.
The law here states that neither you, nor the vehicles on either side of you, be travelling above 30km/h, so that more or less covers the speed differential issue, but still allows riders to take advantage of their vehicle in slow or stalled traffic. I filter a fair bit on my daily commute. Drivers were a bit aggressive in the first couple of months but they’re used to us now, often even moving over in the lane (Aussie roads are extremely narrow compared to US roads, so filtering requires constant judgment: can I fit through that gap?)
I was actually speaking more to the situation when traffic isn’t at a complete standstill, but rather moving at reasonable speed (just with a lot of cars, so timing your merge to the very end of the merge lane is going to be tricky at best, and if you fuck it up you end up having to stop which fucks everybody else up). And in that situation, even the Minnesota DOT recommends merging early. 
Apologies for being unclear.
So in other words, it depends on a lack of human beings in order to work correctly. Well, I guess once we all have self driving cars the problem will go away.
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I let people who use their turn signal in.
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I hate that someone will get ahead of me so I am against lane splitting… I have arguments and evidence that I’m right so I think everyone should do what I want and stop lane splitting. That way I won’t have to see someone get where they are going faster than I can…
Is that the argument?
There seems to be a different argument based on the experience with lane splitters being insane and according to those in this thread who do ride: doing it wrong.
My experience with lane splitting before reading this thread would have been totally against it since the majority of the time I see it done around me it is at insane speeds relative to traffic. I almost never see it practiced as apparently it should be. However apparently it is not legal here so those that would be doing it properly may just be obeying the local laws and not doing it.
California is the only state where it is legal AFAIK.
And honestly the one spot on the commute home where it would do me good if traffic is crazy slow I can just as easily get off the interstate and take the side streets and get home just as fast as if I could do lane splitting.
